In the summer of 2019, in a nondescript office building in Binjiang, Hangzhou, 29-year-old Wang Xingxing was demonstrating his robotic dog to visiting investors. At that time, the company's accounts had only a few hundred thousand yuan left and urgently needed a round of funding.
Standing opposite him was Li Yannan, Managing Director of Sequoia Capital China. Watching the robotic dog toddling and swaying its head, he vaguely saw a greater possibility.
Soon, Wang Xingxing took his robotic dog to Beijing for Sequoia Capital China's investment committee meeting. To give investors a more intuitive feel, he volunteered to bring the robotic dog for a live demonstration. However, due to the battery exceeding the size limit, it couldn't be taken on high-speed trains or airplanes. In the end, Wang Xingxing took an overnight sleeper train for over ten hours from Hangzhou to Beijing.
Seven years passed in a flash.
Today (August 19th), Hangzhou Unitree Robotics Co., Ltd. (referred to as Unitree) officially listed on the Sci-Tech Innovation Board (STAR Market), becoming the "first humanoid robot stock" on the A-share market — with an issue price of 150.80 yuan per share, its opening price soared over 500%, giving it a market value of approximately 400 billion yuan.
The young man who once squeezed onto a sleeper train has become the highest-net-worth individual born in the 1990s on the STAR Market. Behind him, Sequoia Capital China, having made its first investment in 2019, continuously increased its stake, becoming the independent private equity investment fund with the largest shareholding ratio in Unitree.
This is one of the most remarkable comeback stories in the venture capital circle over the past decade, and also a victory born from passion, perseverance, and belief.
7 Years Ago, Sequoia's Investment Committee Meeting
Sequoia's acquaintance with Unitree began with a QQ email.
It was July 2019 when Li Yannan heard about Unitree and a young man named Wang Xingxing from a Zhejiang University alumnus.
Born in 1990 in Ningbo, Zhejiang, Wang Xingxing was not a traditional academic star. He was severely weak in English and was once considered a "poor student" in the eyes of teachers. But his hands-on skills were exceptional: During his undergraduate studies at Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, he built a 14-degree-of-freedom small bipedal robot with just over 200 yuan; during his graduate studies at Shanghai University, he created the low-cost, purely electric-driven quadruped robot XDog, with the entire machine costing only 20,000 yuan. At a Shanghai robotics competition, Wang Xingxing won second prize and an 80,000 yuan bonus, beginning to make a name for himself.
After graduating with a master's degree in 2016, Wang Xingxing joined DJI but resigned after just over two months, moved to Hangzhou, and started his robotics venture. He successively developed products like Laikago and AlienGo, gradually gaining fame within the geek community.
But unlike today's grand scene, Unitree's early financing was not smooth. Investors' reasons were either that robotic dogs were too niche or that the founder wasn't "elite" enough.
The turning point came in the summer of 2019.
Following the QQ email on Unitree's official website, Li Yannan searched for the WeChat ID and found Wang Xingxing, arranging to see the product. At that time, Unitree's office was still in Jinxiu Center. During their first meeting, Wang Xingxing demonstrated his robotic dog — it could jump, tumble, and its movements were clean and sharp.
What moved Li Yannan was not just the product, but Wang Xingxing himself: his passion for technology, his deep thinking about robotics, and his intense focus. He immediately judged: this investment was worth pushing forward quickly.
The subsequent progress was faster than imagined. The Saturday after meeting Li Yannan, Wang Xingxing met with Sequoia Capital China's partner at Shanghai airport, and received a term sheet the next day. And so, 29-year-old Wang Xingxing took his robotic dog into Sequoia Capital China's Beijing investment committee meeting.
But that meeting was not easy.
"In its early stages, Unitree was a company with very obvious strengths and weaknesses. We had many intense discussions internally, with strong disagreements." Li Yannan recalled. In 2019, high-performance robotic dogs were seen by most as a "niche, geeky direction" with no clear demand scenario. Drones had gone from geek to mainstream, giving birth to DJI, but whether robotic dogs could replicate that path was still a huge question mark.
In the end, what convinced the committee was Wang Xingxing himself.
At the meeting, he described a seemingly far-fetched vision: to build a robot taller than a mountain, to build a robot that can enter blood vessels, to use robots to build robots. Those words sounded distant at the time, but behind them was a young man's purest belief in robotics.
"Many great companies in history were highly controversial at the beginning," Li Yannan remarked. In Sequoia's scoring system that day, the committee gave scores of 9 out of 10 on the Outlier and Vision dimensions. Soon, Sequoia Capital China made its first investment in Unitree's Pre-A round through its seed fund, becoming one of the company's earliest institutional investors.
In Unitree's subsequent Pre-A+, B, and C rounds, Sequoia China added stakes three times. Unitree also became a classic case of Sequoia China's full-stage investment from seed to late stage. According to the prospectus, Sequoia China holds a 7.11% stake in Unitree, the largest proportion among independent private equity investment funds.
With Unitree's IPO today, the Sequoia Seed Fund welcomed its second IPO since its independent operation in 2018, and the first IPO project invested by its RMB fund.
Half the Investment Circle Came
Li Yannan later learned that when he first met Wang Xingxing in 2019, Unitree's situation was already quite precarious — DJI backed out at the last moment before the deal was finalized, causing that round of financing to fail, and Unitree's cash flow was almost depleted.
The day before the investment committee meeting, a mutual friend commented on Wang Xingxing's WeChat Moments asking what he had been up to recently. He jokingly replied: "Feeling like I'm about to fail at this startup. If it doesn't work out, I'll go back to Shenzhen to work for someone else."
But at the committee meeting the next day, he showed no sign of giving up — calm, confident, articulate, and full of self-assurance. Li Yannan still remembers the look in Wang Xingxing's eyes when he demonstrated the robot in the meeting room, gazing at his creation.
Later, whenever there was an opportunity to showcase the product, Wang Xingxing was full of enthusiasm. In 2019 and 2020, he repeatedly volunteered to bring the robotic dog to Sequoia's CEO Summit. Without a booth, he would wait outside the venue holding the robotic dog. Looking back now, those scenes capture the most simple passion a founder has for what he does — even today, it's enough to move people.
Before this, Unitree's institutional investors were only a few like Variable Capital and Deccan Capital. Later, as Sequoia China invested, Unitree's financing landscape gradually opened up:
Prominent institutions like Vertex Ventures, Chuxin Capital, Shunwei Capital, Matrix Partners China, Shenzhen Capital Group, Rongyi Investment, Dunhong Asset, Jinshi Investment, Source Code Capital, and Jinqiu Fund successively joined; local state-owned capital such as China Internet Investment Fund, Beijing Robotics Industry Investment Fund, Zhongguancun Science City, and Shanghai Sci-tech Innovation Fund also invested one after another; China's internet and industrial capital giants like Meituan, Tencent, Alibaba, Ant Group, China Mobile, and Geely Capital all arrived.
In the last round of financing in June 2025, Unitree's post-money valuation reached 12.7 billion yuan. The prospectus shows that Meituan, acting in concert through three companies — Hanhai Information, Chengdu Longzhu, and Galaxy Z — holds a combined stake of approximately 9.65%, making it the largest external shareholder of Unitree.
And Sequoia's companionship went far beyond just providing capital.
"From years of interaction, Wang Xingxing is a very genuine person," Li Yannan recalled to Investment Community. Wang Xingxing makes decisive and precise decisions in areas he excels in, but can be hesitant and conflicted in unfamiliar territory. Yet he never hides this; instead, he actively seeks help. This is also why he has been able to "attract people" along the way.
Investment Community learned that almost every professional firm involved — the FA for Unitree's early financing, and later the IPO's underwriter, law firm, and accounting firm — was recommended by Sequoia. The Sequoia team accompanied him to meet them, participated in interviews, gave advice, helping him find the right direction in unfamiliar fields.
"A typical outlier, the evangelist of quadruped robots in China." Sequoia Capital China wrote in its investment memo for Unitree.
Not from a prestigious school, starting a business right after graduation; young and daring, without the backing of illustrious academic or professional achievements, and lacking funds and resources, yet becoming the one who laughs last in the perilous journey of entrepreneurship. Inside Sequoia, there is a specific term for this type of entrepreneur — outlier.
Wang Xingxing is a typical outlier. Almost starting from grassroots, he spent ten years building Unitree into the world's largest humanoid robot company by shipment volume, with annual revenue of about 1.7 billion yuan.
Looking back at the seven years between Sequoia China and Unitree, from a QQ email to the IPO bell-ringing stage, this is undoubtedly a victory for "non-consensus." The ultimate embodiment of investing in an "outlier" is precisely this — backing a person not understood by the majority and accompanying him until he is seen by all.
After Unitree
Unitree's IPO is just one piece of Sequoia China's embodied intelligence landscape.
Starting as early as around 2013, Sequoia China began investing in drones, intelligent mobility, and other fields, having backed companies like DJI and Ninebot. It was one of the earliest domestic investment institutions to bet on this track. Over the next decade, Sequoia tracked the evolution of technology, continuously expanding its chessboard.
Unitree's Pre-A round was a starting point. Subsequently, companies like Agile Robots, Mech-Mind, HAI ROBOTICS, Pudu Robotics, AgileX Robotics, Fourier Intelligence, etc., entered Sequoia's sights.
The pace accelerated noticeably in recent years — from the brain to the cerebellum, from the body to core components, Sequoia has invested in a robotics army: behind star companies like Zhiyuan Robotics, Zibian Robotics, Qianxun Intelligence, Qiongche Intelligence, Tashi Zhihang, Xingdong Jiyuan, Genesis, Sharpa, Wuji, Lingxin Qiaoshou, etc., there is Sequoia's presence.
At this moment, robotics companies are ushering in a wave of listings: Leju Robotics and DeepRobotics have entered the A-share IPO process; unicorns valued at tens of billions like Zhiyuan Robotics, Galaxy General, ZhiPingFang, Fourier Intelligence, Zhongqing Robotics, Xinghai Tu, and Songyan Dynamics are also preparing for IPOs.
Among this vast procession, Unitree's IPO undoubtedly provides a verifiable valuation anchor point for the entire industry. As one investor described, the greatest significance of Unitree's listing lies in: it finally gives both the primary and secondary markets a pricing reference point — how much is an embodied intelligence company actually worth?
But Unitree's IPO also means consolidation is accelerating. At the very least, opportunities for embodied intelligence companies to list on the STAR Market will become scarcer. Amidst a thousand troops and ten thousand horses, some will reap the benefits of going public, while others will face life-or-death elimination. This is an inevitable law as the industry matures, especially this year, as embodied intelligence players collectively stand at the watershed moment of transitioning from technical verification to scaled commercialization.
And more profoundly, China's embodied intelligence industry is being redefined.
"Unitree's successful IPO, from the perspective of corporate growth, is an important phased achievement and milestone. But from the perspective of embodied intelligence development, this is just a starting point." As Li Yannan said, embodied intelligence is still in a relatively early stage. How to scale from thousands of units shipped to millions of households, how to achieve true general-purpose generalization across thousands of industries — there are still too many challenges to solve, and companies like Unitree are needed to explore more "uncharted territories."
Humankind may be transient visitors in the universe, but technology is eternal. Recalling the words Wang Xingxing left for the world: "The torrent of technology surges forward; I am willing to be that small boat."
As Chinese robots begin to step onto the global stage, behind them stands not just Unitree, but a generation of young people like Wang Xingxing who believe technology can change the world. At the forefront, the Chinese narrative of embodied intelligence has just begun.
This article is from the WeChat public account "Investment Community" (ID: pedaily2012), author: Zhou Jiali
